Microsoft AutoUpdate Daemon renamed

A last minute decision to rename Microsoft AutoUpdate’s daemon from “Microsoft AU Daemon.app” to “Microsoft Update Assistant.app” in version 4.15 caused an unexpected dialog to appear for users last week.

MacAdmins have been suppressing this standard macOS dialog for several years by pre-registering Microsoft AutoUpdate in the Launch Services database. The sudden name change caused the dialog to unexpectedly appear during the monthly update cycle of Microsoft Office in September.

Read on for details of what needs to be updated in your script to suppress this dialog for users going forward.

The issue was first reported in the MacAdmins Slack on Tuesday and confirmed by Microsoft’s Paul Bowden on Friday. Bowden stated that the Bundle ID is unchanged, despite the rename, so it shouldn’t effect PPPC permissions.

Erik Gomez provided one of the first versions of the script used to pre-register MAU almost four years ago. Updating it to work with MAU 4.15 requires only a simple edit.

#!/bin/bash

if [ -e "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app" ]
    then 
        /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -R -f -trusted "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app"
fi

if [ -e "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Update Assistant.app" ]
    then 
        /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -R -f -trusted "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Update Assistant.app"
fi

This script will need to be run in the user context for every user on a computer to avoid the dialog. A popular way to accomplish this is with Outset but it can be accomplished through management systems such as Jamf as well.

I have included the script, MicrosoftAutoUpdate2.sh, in a collection of my Outset scripts on Github. Bowden’s RegMAU script on Github has also been updated for the name change.